State
of the
Art10 even 12 terabytes of hard d
Another factor is the way ca
RAM aren’t “persistent”. Whe
off the power, they get erased
memory, like a hard drive, has
a separate thing.
Now Intel wants to break dow
with a radical new kind of mem
At the chip level, it’s called 3D X
(pronounced: cross-point) but f
type purposes it’s branded Opt
The first Optane-equipped s
drives came out in 2016, but 20
launch of a substantial update. While Optane
will load your games faster on a home PC, it’s
real benefit will be for those workhorses of
the internet itself: data centres.
Having a fast hard drive in a data centre
server means more than just being able to
read and write files quickly. The hard drive
needs to be able to respond to a request for
a file quickly too.
With NAND- or flash-memory based SSDs,
as the number of requests for data increases,
so does the wait-time for each new request.
Being able to grab a file in a microsecond isn’t
that great if you have to wait a whole second
to even get your turn to ask for the file.
Intel’s enterprise Optane drives - such
as the DC P4800X we tested - maintain
responsiveness even as the load on their
server ramps up. It keeps the data moving.
This can be applied to situations rather
more important than just browsing funny
cat pictures. An example Intel gave us
was an MRI development project at the
Unviersity of Pisa.
One of the problems with MRI is it
requires patients to lie inside a gigantic
magnet, which makes weird clanking noises,
sometimes for as long as 40 minutes. This
isn’t great for anyone who, for instance,
suffers from claustrophobia.
An experimental new MRI systemequipped with Optane memory (among
other innovations) is able to do what’s
called “in-memory computing”, and hold
vast amounts of data close to the CPU for
extremely fast access.
Early results show with this system, a
typical MRI could be completed in just two
minutes. Apart from being good for patients,
that’s great for hospitals too. More tests,
faster results, better patient outcomes.
Right now enterprise-grade Optane
memory is still very expensive. But Intel says
it’s still an easy sell. Organisations like Ali Bab,
IBM, Digital Ocean and more all recognise the
benefits and are keen to see the technology
rolled out. In Ali Baba’s case, a new “database
as a service” called Polar DB, and built around
Optane, is already proving to be six times
faster than a traditional MySQL database.
That’s a big deal.
Right now Optane is still kind of esoteric,
for regular end users. But within a matter
of years, the idea of having separate RAM
and storage in your device - phone, tablet,
PC whatever - might just be as obsolete as
vacuum tubes and punch-cards.Enterprise-grade
drives have a special
form-factor with ultra-
fast connections.End users will most
likely first encounter
Optane in the form of
a high-end SSD